Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday October 27, 2011 @07:59AM
from the going-for-volcano-of-the-year dept.

dutchwhizzman writes "Uturuncu is a Bolivian supervolcano. Research suggests that it has an eruption frequency of roughly 300,000 years and the last eruption was, give or take a few years, 300,000 years ago. Research suggests that it started rising in a 70 km diameter by 1 to 2 centimeters per year, making it the fastest-growing volcano on the planet. Break out the tin foil hats, and store plenty of canned beans, because it may just erupt before Yellowstone pops its cork."

USA has been losing the drug war. After trillions of dollars spent with 3 (almost 4) decades of losses the WoD UStrategy has moved to mother-nature manipulation to initiate volcanic activity in global regions that produce and export drugs to US for power and profit. Finally a WoD UStrategy that will destroy the organic source of the problem. No more crops, way less consumers, and the end of another underground economy.

You probably Googled for "War on drugs costs" to get that figure. It's correct - the federal government claims to have spent about 15 Billion in 2010 on it's own website.Maybe you missed the paragraph just below it saying "State and local governments spent at least another 25 billion dollars." As you put it, "assuming constant dollars..." We're up to "at least" 40 Billion per year currently and about 28 years to total a Trillion, and a War On Drugs over nearly twice that time, making Trillions closer to reasonable. Just adding in that state and local component puts us nearly at multiple Trillions.
Beyond that, it's common for parts of the costs of fighting the war on drugs to be hidden elsewhere. Building Prisons often isn't shown as a WOD cost, even though a lot of it has been just that. The US typically, almost invariably, builds prisons because of overcrowding in older facilities rather than because they are wearing out. Then there's the staffing of those prisons - guards, wardens, and related cost money. That 15 Billion you quoted includes some prison costs, but the way the government calculates them assumes that a lot of prisons would be wearing out from age and so considerably understates how much of the prison building and staffing is WOD related.
Then there's foreign aid, a LOT of which is really drug enforcement when you're talking about Central America. (I don't want to suggest a lot of foreign aid in total is WOD related, as when we're talking "foreign aid in total" it's essentially an Israel/Mideast security related issue, but foreign aid to Central and South America and the Caribbean runs way above aid to, say, Africa over the long haul). When we supply, say, Columbia, with assault helicopters to track down Cocaine plantations, that's often carried in the foreign aid budget, and if we have to supply any of Colombia's neighbors, that don't provide so much raw Cocaine, with weapons (to balance the political situation we are destabilizing by giving one regional power all the neat toys), that's always carried in the foreign aid column.
Multiple full squadrons of assault helicopters, training and basing for them, attack helicopters to protect the assault helicopters when the plantations started deploying shoulder mounted rocket launchers, high grade crypto and commo that we don't export elsewhere (because the plantation owners can afford to hack and eavesdrop on older commo), and maintenance for all that - it isn't cheap. Then we have to let someone else in the region have a foreign aid grant to buy, say, destroyer escorts from US approved firms, so that the regional balance of power is maintained. Then our conservative politicians tell their base how foreign aid is all driven by liberals.
You can find funding that's really WOD related in quite a few areas beyond prisons and foreign aid. Part of the Dept of the Interior budget is for keeping people from growing dope in national parks, giving rangers better armament and more practice time. We use Dept. of the Interior personnel to search for tunnels along isolated parts of the US/Canadian border, and even sometimes the Mexican border. There's a line in the overall Homeland Security budget that's about 1/3rd of the FBI total budget. It's for the FBI to run ranges to train all the other security agencies like BATF or Treasury in firearms use. The DEA's weapon's training is thus not carried as a DEA cost any more, since the USA PATRIOT act consolidated that cost. Then the CIA and NSA lend some of their high tech support to the WOD, and it isn't always carried openly in that '15 Billion for 2010" figure either, but its impossible to tell just how much is hidden when you're talking about agencies whose whole budget is basically a black box item. Try adding in such things, and we could make a pretty good case for over 3 Trillion. For all we can be sure of, there's WOD funding shifted to Dept. of Energy, Educ

I think it's like when you line the baking tray with foil before putting the turkey in the oven. Clearly our new cannibalistic post-volcano overlords want to make sure that we're nicely cooked - not too dry, but not undercooked in the centre either. The last thing you need is to have to get up from your throne of skulls in your remote mountain fortress every 10 minutes to run to the restroom.

I know you were making a joke (and for the record, it was kind of funny), but FWIW, the Mayans didn't die out. I was in Guatemala hanging out with a bunch of Mayans [google.com] not quite two years ago (who, incidentally, were asking me what was with the "Mayan" 2012 thing they had been hearing about, lol). They've largely been incorporated into the culture of the countries in which they now live, but they still keep their ancestral lineage and speak their various Mayan dialects (Tzutachiel, IIRC, was the dialect spoken by the group I was with) as well Spanish.

In Uxmal, there's a marker that plaque that explains both the fact that the Maya built the pyramids themselves - they did not have the help of any aliens, and points out "Nor did the Maya disappear. We are still here. One of us wrote this plaque!"

Also, point of correction: The term for the people is the "Maya". The languages are "Mayan". "Mayans" is an obsolete term that is not correct in any context.

(Also, they don't generally refer to *themselves* as Maya, but rather as "Tzotzil", "Winik atel", "Yucatec", and so forth. (Or, occasionally, "Indios", which I've never been able to figure out whether it translates as "Indians" or "Indigenous" - they call the North American Native Americans "Indios" as well.))

Anyway, I always wonder if it wouldn't be possible to drill a hole in the volcano and let off some pressure or something.

While this would be a very good source of geothermal power for us puny humans, I doubt that we could drill a hole wide enough to accommodate 1 cubic meter per second, which according to TFA, is the rate at which the magma chamber is growing. That, and you are left with the problem of what to do with the 86,400 cubic meters of magma per day (about 170,000 tonnes' worth), every day. Where do you plan on parking it?

While we humans pride ourselves on our technology and our ability to move things around and build things, a supervolcano is simply on too big of a scale for us. It would be like a mite imagining it had the power to tell an elephant where to go. Geology (vulcanism, earthquakes) and meteorology (hurricanes, tornadoes) is going to happen to us whether we like it or not. Hopefully one day we'll be smart enough to just get out of the way in time when it does happen.

No, I don't think oil is the same as magma, obviously, I was just comparing the numbers for reference.

I didn't intend on lining the bore hole. Just drill deep enough, and let the lava flow out. If the flow is big enough, the supply of additional heat should keep the hole open. If not, there's probably not enough pressure to worry about an eruption.

Careful. There's enough pressure to lift the rock on top by 1cm per year, right? The issue with magma is that it CAN have dissolved gasses in it under tremendous pressure; when you drill that hole, if you don't maintain that same pressure, the magma starts to fizz. Fizzy magma doesn't weigh as much, so it gets pushed up, reducing the pressure, making it fizzier and less dense, etc. It just goes and goes faster and faster until all the pressure is relieved, and if it happens to erode a larger hole with the jet of superheated rock, well, that's another way to erupt faster. Think geyser (which accumulates superheated water under pressure until it finally starts to boil, then it all blows at once). Think Macondo blow out in the Gulf of Mexico.

There are some things where you're better off not poking them with sticks to see what happens. I think this might be one of them.

Contrariwise, if you thought you knew what you were doing (note the use of the contrary-to-fact subjunctive:-) you might be able to drill pressure relief wells around the edges, to get smaller "controllable" eruptions.

Well if you can cool it, I'm pretty sure we can find someone who will be more than happy to mine it and dispose of it somewhere. That stuff is probably pretty rich on juicy (but slightly warm) minerals.

While this would be a very good source of geothermal power for us puny humans, I doubt that we could drill a hole wide enough to accommodate 1 cubic meter per second, which according to TFA, is the rate at which the magma chamber is growing.

Not long ago, in Chile, it was demonstrated that a deep hole wide enough for a man can be drilled reasonably quickly. That would be a hole with a diameter which is a significant fraction of a meter, which could handle a flow of 1 cubic meter per second for many materials. If the hole enlarges itself, somewhat more might be able to flow.

Not long ago, in Chile, it was demonstrated that a deep hole wide enough for a man can be drilled reasonably quickly. That would be a hole with a diameter which is a significant fraction of a meter, which could handle a flow of 1 cubic meter per second for many materials. If the hole enlarges itself, somewhat more might be able to flow.

I'm pretty sure that hole wasn't immediately flooded with upward-flowing magma at the completion of the drilling. That might complicate matters a bit.

No, the largest eruption on record only gave like a year of cooled weather, and while these are likely to be substantially larger eruptions, an eruption large enough to produce a climate change mooting atmospheric change would probably go a long ways towards ending life as we know it.

Perhaps somebody knows better, but the way that the effect works, you need a huge change the next year and it diminishes each year as the particles fall out of the atmosphere.

Then multiply it by 1000. At once. Just for this guy. It would be bad. A lot of people on different continents would die from lack of food because the growing season would be nonexistent for many people. For years.

If the Siberian Traps go, we're all fucked. That's called an extinction event.

Yes indeedy. Or if Yellowstone goes. Did anyone point out that supervolcano eruptions (or straight up basaltic flows) can go on for, say, million year timescales? They can alter climate catastrophically for time frames of hundreds of thousands of years and they produce all sorts of interesting gases that are up-front toxic, not to mention the hot molten rock that can spread out over hundreds of thousands of square kilometers. They are baaaaad.

Wow really? I mean this has got to be about the dumbest thing I have ever read on slashdot."No, the largest eruption on record only gave like a year of cooled weather, and while these are likely to be substantially larger eruptions, an eruption large enough to produce a climate change mooting atmospheric change would probably go a long ways towards ending life as we know it.Duhhh A super volcano would be at least an order of magnitude worse then Krakatoa. I decided to spend a little time and look it up and

Not really. The poster was explaining that volcanic eruptions have a relatively short time effect on the climate. The first year after the eruption, the effect is big, and then exponentially decays with each passing year.

This means that a volcano is not going to give any kind of relief. A small eruption only means a few cool years before the global warming resumes on the old trend. A large eruption would cause a longer cooling period, but would kill most life in the first year. Either way, we're hosed.

There are no 'goldilocks eruptions' that would bring relief from global warming for a few decades, without causing substantial harm themselves.

A supervolcano is *significantly* larger than the largest recorded volcanic eruption, on the order of ten times or more. The last one, Lake Toba, was 70,000 years ago, or so. And according to what I have read, mitochondrial DNA shows a genetic bottleneck around that time where something reduced the human population down to a few tens of thousands across the entire world. And this is back when humans were a lot better at moving around and hunting and gathering getting their own food.

It would make the current level of human climate change look like a joke in particularly bad taste.

The largest volcanic eruption in historic times, in 1815 at Mount Tambora, ejected the equivalent of around 100 km3 (24 cu mi) of dense rock and made 1816 the "Year Without a Summer" in the whole northern hemisphere. The Lake Toba explosion ejected 2,800 km3 (670 cu mi) and probably created volcanic equivalent of a Nuclear winter for years, not to mention the acidic rain and other fun volcanic stuff.

I don't think you have the right concept of the fragility of our current system.

Agriculture will fail worldwide. Period. We don't have 2-3 years of food stockpiled. Period. People will rapidly eat all the food available, and anything that can be turned into food. Any "complex protective shelter" will be stormed and looted. Think zombie apocalypse, except everyone is starving rather than undead.

Any resource that *could* sustainably support a reduced population through the course of the disaster will, b

I am coming at this from an uneducated viewpoint, but would appreciate an answer from someone a bit more educated...

If we were to drill into this forming volcano, use geothermal energy to create electricity, could you delay, decrease or prevent the volcano from erupting? It seems like a really good win/win situation where you get almost free energy and prevent a small country from getting obliterated.

The estimated volume of Yellowstone eruption was 1000km^3 while Krakatoa eruption was 25km^3. If one consider that energy ~ volume, then Yellowstone is estimated to be 1Gigaton of TNT

For comparison, in circa October 2008 [nti.org] operational stockpile of US "contains the explosive equivalent of more than 91,500 Hiroshima-sized bombs" x 15kT ~ 1.5 Gigaton of TNT.

It was said many times that existing stockpile of nuclear weapon is enough to cause a Nuclear Winter. According to one of the recent models [wikipedia.org]:

A global average surface cooling of –7C to –8C persists for years, and after a decade the cooling is still –4C (Fig. 2). Considering that the global average cooling at the depth of the last ice age 18,000 yr ago was about –5C, this would be a climate change unprecedented in speed and amplitude in the history of the human race. The temperature changes are largest over land... Cooling of more than –20C occurs over large areas of North America and of more than –30C over much of Eurasia, including all agricultural regions.

"The projected 2010 anthropogenic CO2 emission rate of 35 gigatons per year is 135 times greater than the 0.26-gigaton-per-year preferred estimate for volcanoes."

"Scaling up CO2 releases of volcanic paroxysms to the 35-gigaton anthropogenic CO2 emission level is also revealing. For example, scaling up the 0.05-gigaton CO2 release of the 15 June 1991 Mount Pinatubo paroxysm to the current anthropogenic CO2 emission level requires 700 equivalent paroxysms annually."

I don't have to redistribute it with any kind of efficiency. My primary goal is to keep the sucker from blowing up. Worst case scenario, we vent and let the energy escape for free. In that way we'd have a controlled eruption over years rather than in one giant blast.

Doesn't matter if you have losses in transmission. The point is to cool the magma and produce some power. And if you can't transmit it all, you can set up industrial operations to use the excess, like, for example, converting bauxite into aluminum or perhaps making titanium on a large scale, desalinization, glass making.... All as a by-produce of saving the planet.

The key problems are could you ever cool the magma fast enough (does the heat come in faster than you can get it out given heat transfer limit

I am coming at this from an uneducated viewpoint, but would appreciate an answer from someone a bit more educated...

If we were to drill into this forming volcano, use geothermal energy to create electricity, could you delay, decrease or prevent the volcano from erupting? It seems like a really good win/win situation where you get almost free energy and prevent a small country from getting obliterated.

70km across (35,000m radius, about 4 billion square meters)... you were planning on extracting energy using maybe 30cm diameter pipes? Say, generously, these pipes can pull heat energy from lava up to 30m away from themselves (3000 square meters), To drain heat energy from just 1% of the surface of the dome, you'd need 13,000 pipes - how deep are you planning to sink them to have an effect? Even if you solidify the cap to a depth of 5km, I'm not sure that the forces underneath would be contained, they'd probably just divert to somewhere nearby, and likely explode with even greater force from a smaller area.

It would be a big project - if you put all the oil drillers in the western hemisphere on the job, you might make an ineffective cooling "cap" a few km deep within a few hundred years - all that heat being dumped into the ocean (unless you have a preferable heat sink?) would have a devastating effect on thousands of square km of sea life, and sure, there'd be "free" geothermal energy until the volcano blew, but only as far as you could transmit it.

Thanks for your reply. my question is why would the pipe only to pull energy from lava a few meters away from itself? If I am extracting energy from the lava underneath, it seems like conduction would mean I'd be pulling from a much larger area. I'm not looking to drain all of the energy in one day or one year. Just enough to keep the system in some type of equilibrium. If the numbers I found for Mt. St Helen are correct, and even if I assume that this volcano is a thousand times larger, it doesn't seem lik

13k pipes seems like a cheap price to pay to preserve South America from an apocalypse and save the world from a global agricultural train wreck.

I guess an alternative is to relocate everyone in South America and stockpile 2 years of food for every person alive. That'd be a lot more practical if we only had a few hundred million people alive at the time--probably a better way to go.

I'm sure that most dam builders now accept the silting problems and even have solutions for it.

- yet Katrina happened just 6 years ago. Sure, they can raise the levies higher, but that just pushes the problem a little into the future, like the government inflating money supply, pushing the eventual resolution of the depression into the future, in the meanwhile the water is getting higher and inflation is getting bigger and the eventual collapse will bring even more water into the city and inflation may turn into hyper inflation.

But anyway, there may be some sort of a solution that could work, but w

In addition to the risk of popping it, you have to realize that there's a tremendous amount of energy there, it's sort of like how you can have a magnitude 5 earthquake and then have a magnitude 9 a few months later, there's just so much energy involved that you're not going to have a relatively minor thing like that bleeding off enough energy for it to make much of a difference.

I don't think you could do it with just geothermal extraction, but as a somewhat more mad-scientist oriented approach, might it be possible to drill a pressure-release valve? Obviously you'd have to use an unmanned machine for such a venture, because you will lose it once the lava begins to flow, but if you could get to the right point before the pressure gets too high, might you be able to drain it off in a reasonably controlled manner?

There's some process in the mantle feeding this area, adding mass to it. The biggest problem is pressure, since that mass is used to compress the volume under the volcano. When the rock shatters, that pressure is communicated with the surface and then there is an upward flow.

Refrigerating the volume of rock under the volcano won't change much of its pressure.

From a geoengineering point of view, I think that what's necessary is a controlled er

You'd need to take the energy out of that thing at a certain rate. Let's see what ballpark that rate falls into.

For potential energy, if we assume average crust density of 2.7g/cm^3, radius of 35km, 10km thick, then 2*pi*(35km)^2*10km*2.7g/cm^3 = 6E15kg. That rising 1cm a year means energy flow of 6E14J/year = 18MW. That's the minimum you'd have to extract, methinks.

The heat flow from the mantle over this area is 65E-3 W/(m^2) * (2*pi*(35 km)^2) = 500MW, so it's an order of magnitude more.

Well no really.1. It is unlikely that we could drill deep enough to get to the really hot stuff.2. You would need lots of water since you are hoping that there is not a lot of water in that mix.3, If there is a lot of water BOOM.4. It would not just take out a small country it will take out a large section of South America. Coffee and cocaine product would both end.5. All that drilling may cause it to erupt.And now let's talk about scale.The last super volcano eruption in that area looks to have been a larg

A ballon pops because it is a thin membrane, and if you poke a thin hole in it you introduce stress concentration that is enough to tear it apart. Basically, after a hole has been made, the mechanical energy stored in the balloon is used up in creation of new surfaces at the tear, and the effect is self sustaining. If you try that trick with pressure vessels, you'll find that as long as the hole is big enough, or the vessel is thick enough, it won't disintegrate.

It's not so much the distance of the lava over the ground. If you carefully pop the cork from a champagne bottle, it does not overflow. Be somewhat less gentle, and the stuff overflows from the top and drips down the side, maybe you get a bit of rise. There are volcanos that look like this when erupting. Shake vigorously, and the cork will launch itself on a fountain of bubbles. That's a volcano lik Mt. St. Helens. For a supervolcano, the champagne bottle is insufficient as a simile. Think broken fire hydr

Don't worry, gas is going to run out long before then. Oh we'll still be able to synthesize it from other things, but I'm sure the price will limit it to government/official/emergency use only. On the bright side America will be forced to kick its obesity habit since towns are built on such a huge scale - any commute is going to be a long bike ride.

Hey, you might not want to bet on that so far! Some analysts speculate America could be largely energy independent in just 5-10 years thanks to new extraction techniques. America today imports far less than we did even 5 years ago.

I will not make any assumptions as to whether that is a joke or not, but if you were being serious, you may like to know that members of many continental European countries use a comma as their decimal point and vice versa. Alas 13,000.00 would be written as 13.000,00. As the original poster's name includes the word 'dutch' it may give an indication along this line.

When translating text into a different language, it is customary to also translate the various other locale-specific conventions. For example, if you are translating a note about a meeting on the third of January from French to American English, then you would be incorrect if you did not rewrite 1/3 as 3/1. Similarly, you would be incorrect if you did not change 100,000 into 100.000. This is especially important if there are three digits after the decimal point, because comma is used as a thousands separ

Look, it was predicted by the South Americans. Who would know the terrain best? Natives who lived there for thousands of years? Or some mamby pamby scientist in a lab coat, thick glasses, may be a beard and a few letters behind his name?

Good, now I will resolve the defect about my time counter being 32 bits and going to over flow in y2k32 as "not worth fixing."

The Wikipedia article linked from the/. summary states that the volcano last produced lava "between 890 and 271 thousand years ago". I'm not sure that really qualifies as "give or take a few years, 300.000 years ago".

The actual volcano in question ISN'T a super volcano. It's a conventional volcano as it has a mountain peak. A super volcano never forms a mountain because of the size and speed of the eruption can't pile lava up to form a mountain peak. All there is of a super volcano is a large caldera at ground level, or perhaps in a valley (like at Yellowstone). However there ARE extinct super volcanos in the area (perhaps not so extinct?).

That if it were to start erupting. There is not one damned thing we could do about it. Nothing. Well placed nukes might change the pattern of eruption slightly, but that's about all. With a very few exceptions, we'd be king-hell fucked as a species.